FISA, NSA Spying a New Focus of Tech Lobby

Concerns over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), as well as attempts by intelligence agencies to collect user information from email and social networking sites, appeared on the second-quarter lobbying disclosure reports of several tech firms.

After several quarters of increasing expenditures on lobbying, a number of the big name high-tech companies backed off a bit, the filings showed. But despite the lower expenditures,

12 organizations specifically cited concerns over FISA in their second quarter reports. The topic wasn’t mentioned in any first quarter 2013 reports, before public revelations that the National Security Agency was collecting data on American citizens from email and social networking sites.

The list includes several prominent watchdog groups, like the Project on Government Oversight and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, in addition to civil liberties organizations and First Amendment-oriented groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Library Association and the Free Press Fund.

Additionally, Facebook‘s second quarter disclosure did not note FISA by name, but did include disclosure of “discussions, urging more transparency and flexibility around national security-related orders. Education regarding Internet media information security policy and Internet privacy issues.”

Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and Twitter (which did not file a lobbying report), have all publicly expressed concern over PRISM, the data collection program run by the NSA, which the government says is authorized under FISA. However, this is the first time that any of the companies have explicitly reported lobbying the federal government on the topic.

While it’s not clear from lobbying reports how much money or time each of the companies, or trade associations that represent them, have spent on the specific subject of FISA, the resources each one has available are substantially larger than any of the watchdog or civil liberties groups. In fact, each one of these five groups lobby substantially more than the other eight organizations that disclosed lobbying on FISA — combined.

Overall Lobbying Down

Despite the inclusion of this new hot-button issue in their K Street agendas, all of these groups except Microsoft actually toned down their federal lobbying expenditures in the second quarter of 2013. That’s a reversal of a trend of the last year, when lobbying by high-tech companies, in particular by Facebook and Google, exploded.

Facebook, for example, spent just $207,000 on federal lobbying in 2009, but by 2012 it had spent $3.8 million, enough to make it the 135th biggest spender on lobbying out of the roughly 4,360 organizations OpenSecrets.org tracked last year. In the first three months of this year, the company spent $2.4 million — almost two-thirds of its entire spending in 2012. But over the last three months, ending July 15, the company spent only $1 million.

Google was on a similar trajectory. In 2010, it spent $5.6 million on lobbying, and $9.6 in 2011. But in 2012, the search engine giant nearly doubled even that, spending $18.2 million as it dove into a variety of new businesses and fought to ward off an antitrust case. In the first three months of 2013, it spent $4.1 million, which put it on track to spend less than 2012, but still a substantial amount. In the second quarter of 2013, however, spending contracted, coming to about $3.6 million.

Microsoft, which used to hold the title as tech heavyweight on K Street but was eclipsed last year by Google, bucked this pattern. In all of 2012, the company spent $8 million on federal lobbying, and in the first quarter of 2013, it spent $2.5 million. It upped that to $2.96 million in the second quarter, putting it well on track to surpass last year’s total, though still less than Google.

The decline is surprising because of Silicon Valley’s interest in the comprehensive immigration overhaul legislation Congress has been considering; it passed the Senate in late June.

An OpenSecrets.orgvote analysis showed that members of the Senate who received significant backing from the computer/internet industry were a substantial bloc among the “yes” votes and so-called “Gang of Eight” who helped push the legislation through. High-tech companies were particularly interested in adding more visas for high-skilled workers and students interested in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) research.

The flat or lower numbers were not limited to just those three. Yahoo!’s federal lobbying increased, but only slightly, from $710,000 in the first quarter of 2013, to $720,000 in the second quarter. Computer and phone manufacturer Apple spent $720,000 in the first quarter of 2013 and just $690,000 in the second.

Russ joined the Center in March 2012 as the money-in-politics reporter. His duties include reporting for OpenSecrets Blog and assisting with press inquiries. Russ has a background in investigative journalism, having worked as a reporter for the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, and he spent five years as a newspaper reporter in New Hampshire. He has a degree in political science from Muhlenberg College and a M.A. in journalism and public affairs from American University.

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